For many years I've used the concept with more advanced students of
developing their personal palette of trumpet skills, both physical and
interpretative.

I find the concept useful because, like artists who use paint, we as
trumpet artists begin to play with just a few options and gradually develop
more and more as we mature.

For example: a young player is usually content just to play the
correct notes to a piece. A slightly more mature player pays close
attention to articulations and dynamics. An artist knows that there
are internal dynamics and secondary articulations which can be applied
to gain subtle effects which less experienced players often don't recognize,
except to understand that, for some reason, the playing of a particular
player moves them more deeply than most.

How do you develop a personal palette? Through practice, through
listening, through performing a wide variety of styles.

When I was an undergraduate I never turned down ANY opportunity to perform,
including with experimental, black box theater productions, a rock-a-billy
band that played for dance class, the Collegium Musicum (in which I learned
to play Renaissance instruments which granted a subtly of articulation
that lends itself beautifully to the trumpet and piccolo trumpet, as well
as interpretative dynamics that lend themselves well to all periods of
music), marching and jazz bands, brass quintet, as well as orchestra, chamber
orchestra, vocal class(accompanying basses, baritones and sopranos on Bach,
Handel, Purcell, Scarlatti, etc), wind ensemble, etc.

Each unique experience lent me the opportunity to expand my personal
palette. The Stravinsky Octet taught me about adjusting my pitch to play
with the bassoon in the extreme upper register(which is much harder to
adjust than is the trumpet's pitch). Working with vocalists, from
youngsters to seasoned professionals, taught me to experiment with vibrato
widths and speeds to alter timbre. (Nothing is so exhilarating to
a soprano as to have a trumpeter who not only matches pitch, but also vibrato
with her).

Playing in experimental theater productions taught me much about aleatoric
music, and alternative techniques, as well as challenged me to produce
a wide variety of timbres.

And those are just a few of many, many examples I could cite.

How many different attacks can you produce with a single tongue?
How do you alter the tongue stroke to produce a different effect?
Try changing the shape of the tip of your tongue while single tonguing
as well as changing the location where that tip strikes. Record yourself
to hear what happens. Of course you should also practice so that
YOU are in control of whether the pitch and timbre change with attacks
or not.

Listen to ALL types of music (and that includes twig-suckers, especially
classical ones). Listen to articulations, phrasing, releases.

Do you pay attention to the releases of notes or just the attacks?
Great musicians manage to be in control of both.

If your attacks are wonderful but your releases are haphazard, your
performance will sound unfinished.

Practice breath releases of various sorts as well as tongue releases.
Taper notes gently, sometimes, even if the written dynamics don't seem
to indicate it.

Remember, what's written on the page is not music, only a rough shorthand
to help the performer reproduce what the composer intended. Sheet music
only becomes MUSIC when it is interpreted and performed.

Practice both details and performance. One in every three practice
sessions should be a *mock* performance in which you emulate your best
possible performance (then carry that with you into actual performance).

Subtlety is a key which is all too often forgotten by trumpeters who
think only of power and projection. Whisper with your trumpet, or
you'll never play the end of the Haydn second movement properly.
You'll have plenty of opportunities to shout through the horn, you
know.

Make your pianissimos as intense as a double forte. Can you?
Work on it (hint: it's in the air support)!

Make your fortissimos as rounded as a fluegelhorn. Can you? Work on
it (hint: it's in the shape of the aperture).

Learn to roll your lips outward and inward (more on that in a later
post) to control pitch, projection and timbre.

Communicate with your audience. There is nothing worse than a
self-centered performer. I once saw an exquisite performance ruined
by a performer finishing a long decrescendo at the end of a piece who abruptly
put her instrument down and looked up at the audience as if to say *There!
I'm done, now applaud!*.

How much better it might have been to maintain the illusion that the
note continued and draw out the suspense so that the audience wasn't quite
sure when the piece was over.....

We are communicators on our trumpets, but like all communicators we
must develop a dynamic vocabulary and style of delivery (and a variety
of styles of delivery) to keep our audience listening.

Work every day on your palette. Develop a library of articulations,
tone colors, dynamics, styles.